Animation maverick offers a warped take on teen melodrama

By SEAN AXMAKER, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Published 9:00 pm, Wednesday, March 22, 2006

The films of Portland's animation maverick, Bill Plympton, are the handmade productions of an idiosyncratic artist in an industrial entertainment marketplace. Practically a one-man production studio, the jittery, sketchy style, colored pencil hues and weird, morphing figures of his shorts have earned two Oscar nominations and a devoted following.

His shorts showcase his talent for tweaked visual metaphors for awkward feelings and intense physical desires, limited only by his perverse imagination. His features, however, reveal his weakness: developing characters and telling stories.

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In "Hair High," his typically warped take on the rock 'n' roll tragedies of young love thwarted in death found in such songs as "Last Kiss" and "Teen Angel" and "Leader of the Pack," he adds a perverse streak and a zombie twist to the tropes of '50s high school innocence and "Rebel Without a Cause" teenage torment.

Only Plympton would feature a smoker hacking up his intestines in a coughing fit and a hormonally overloaded teenager OD'ing on a horse aphrodisiac in a tale of teen love.

When Plympton's freak flag flies, "Hair High" delivers the same whacked-out weirdness of his shorts. The rest of the film simply stretches out the simple premise and marks time between his ideas.

The world theatrical premiere of the film plays with Plympton's animated short "The Fan and the Flower," narrated by Paul Giamatti, at Northwest Film Forum. Plympton will be in attendance and giving away original drawings to everyone attending tonight's opening-night screenings.